Knowledge required for understanding AlphaZero paper
The more you read, the more deeply you can understand any paper, but given your stated background, reading the Monte-Carlo Tree Search chapter of Barto &amp; Sutton, plus Gerald Tesauro's TD-Gammon paper (which is pretty accessible, and which is the basis for the other technique used in AlphaZero) should be enough to get a pretty good idea of what they did.